• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 29, 2015

A dominant player in print listings and local advertising, YP is continuing to reinvent itself for the digital age with a series of new ad products and local marketing partnerships. That includes the launch of YP Audience Extension, a new offering that allows advertisers to expand their campaigns to reach potential customers across other sites in addition to YP's.

YP Audience Extension uses anonymized, first-party search data to identify audiences and suggest audience extensions based on these behaviors and advertiser objectives -- spanning categories and formats including search, mobile and display ads. It also draws on data and analytics from Rocket Fuel’s Audience Accelerator to optimize client ad campaigns; according to the partners this optimization will give advertising clients access to audiences across 99% of the Internet.

YP claims to host over 2.3 billion searches per year across its various properties, which together attract over 70 million unique visitors per month in the U.S.

As noted, YP has launched a raft of new digital ad products and partnerships in recent months.

Most recently, it unveiled a new partnership with mass livery service Uber. Under the terms of the agreement, YP incorporates on-demand Uber ride-hailing into its local listings, so consumers can locate a business and arrange a ride to visit it right away. The service is available for the YP app on both Android and iOS.

In March, YP also announced the launch of ypSearch Marketplace, a keyword-bid local search marketplace that enables national brands to reach YP’s roughly 80 million monthly users across its network.  

Previously, YP announced the launch of Cross-Device Retargeting, powered by Tapad, which allows national advertisers to continue reaching consumers after they switch devices in the middle of a search. It combines first-party local search data with Tapad’s cross-screen identity-tracking capability, which analyzes a variety of usage data from devices to identify behavioral patterns, and thus determine which devices are likely being used by a single individual.

Last year, YP introduced retargeting for online display ads.